NASA views the manned SpaceX rocket launch set for Wednesday as a stellar opportunity to again unify a country fractured by politics and socially distant by way of the coronavirus pandemic.

Jim Bridenstine, a former Oklahoma congressman and NASA’s administrator since 2018, said there’s an important underlying moment at stake when NASA astronauts are set to carry out a test mission on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft powered by Falcon 9 rockets up to the International Space Station. It will be the first manned space launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade as the government has relied on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the space station for the past nine years since the shuttle program shut down.